Why My Daughter Misses our Part-time Tutor

I took this photo to marvel at how finally, our girl is at ease with him. As you surely know by now, he comes half days Mondays to Thursdays to do the driving for our little AuDHD angel, and them, and the playground and vision therapy appointments and at home, for teaching Ammy and Mickey, much of Mickey’s school subjects, doing vision therapy exercises and finding anything to help Micaiah learn to be more coordinated.

She pulls him to the car, sits close. I’m glad she’s relaxed.

But this is not about her. It’s about my ten year old, Amarissa. She told me this morning that she misses him. Yesterday and today he couldn’t get public transport to come to work and his car was being repaired so he didn’t come in. I told her, I’m sad she misses him. And she added, “Because Bk is too friendly when he teaches Maths.” I asked her for clarification. Her brother is too playful? She explained that when she makes mistakes, he’s not strict like a proper teacher, he just says, “Well… It could be… But…” instead of just saying, “Oh that’s wrong try again.” Now that is a novel complaint!

I thought about it, and told her I believed he had trauma. When they were struggling with the more difficult level of Maths for their IGCSEs, their dad would tell me that he doesn’t get why they’d want to move to the less rigorous Maths. Now bear in mind, for decades, I’d heard from their dad how he was in the A stream at school, the clever stream, and did so well with his subjects and was just soooo clever. (Though when I came to his O level and A level certificates, the marks did not reflect the reality I’d been told.) So given no video, tutor could help them, I asked him to help the children seeing as he did Maths in A levels.

It was bad. “But how can you NOT understand this question? What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you thinking? Why is this difficult? Anyone can do this? This is easy!” I told them to stop and we would do our less rigorous Maths for which they got good marks for but translated to a C on their certificates. Good enough for every course they ever considered.

So, I told my dear ten year old that I believe her big brother was over compensating for how their dad made them feel when he made them feel like they were stupid.

And that, is why she misses him. Because he doesn’t let her get away with being wrong by acting like a correction is not indeed, a correction.😅